Democrats and Republicans face off in crowded race for Swain sheriff
The most powerful person in any North Carolina county is the sheriff, an elected position mandated by the state constitution.
County elections determine who will don the badge and serve the four-year term in office. Such a system ostensibly ensures sheriffs are accountable to voters, but a 2024 Ballotpedia analysis of all United States’ elections excluding the presidency found that 7 8% of law enforcement races had only one candidate.
There’s a clear advantage for incumbents; using a data set that included 5,500 sheriffs, analyst Michael Zoorob determined that sitting sheriffs “are about 45 percentage points more likely to run and win the next election.”
That leg up means that in states like North Carolina without term limits, a sheriff might remain in power for decades. The office can become a fertile ground for abuse of power, sometimes without consequences. In Columbus County, a recording surfaced in late 2022 of then-Sheriff Jody Greene’s racist remarks about Black employees, leading to his resignation. But Greene didn’t withdraw from the next month’s election and took home 54% of the vote, winning a short-lived, scandalous term that ended with his second — and final — resignation.
Greene is joined by countless sheriffs nationwide who have resigned from office, sometimes in light of criminal charges involving the likes of drug trafficking, obstruction of justice, sexual assault or murder.
These examples involve a relatively small proportion of elected sheriffs, but one such case remains pivotal in this Swain County election. Former Sheriff Curtis Cochran resigned and was indicted mid-2025 on charges including second-degree rape, sexual battery, assault on a female and felonious restraint; the incidents allegedly occurred on the Qualla Boundary. Commissioners swiftly voted 4-1 to appoint then-Chief Deputy Brian Kirkland as interim sheriff. Kirkland seeks to retain his spot.
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This cycle comes with hunger for transparency from Swain County, including Qualla Boundary residents. That sentiment is reflected on the crowded 2026 ballot that features contested primaries in both the Republican and Democratic parties. With four lifelong Swain County residents in the running — Doug “Tank” Anthony and David Southerland as Democrats, Kirkland and Wayne Dover as Republicans.
Brian Kirkland
Kirkland’s work in law enforcement began when he completed training in 2000 and was hired as a Swain County deputy. In 2004, he joined the Cherokee Indian Police Department as a traffic officer, and he was promoted to sergeant detective three years later. In 2011, he returned to SCSO as a captain, a role he served in until 2025 when he was named chief deputy by Cochran just months before his former boss’ arrest.
The promotion to sheriff came with the responsibility to repair tarnished relationships with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Cherokee Indian Police Department.
Brian Kirkland. File photo
“I’ve worked for Cherokee. I’ve got really good friends that work for Cherokee. So right out the gate, I met not only the chief of the tribe, but I met with the chief of police, where we had really good conversations about repairing our relationship, and we signed a mutual aid agreement,” he said, adding that it’s important to collaborate given that “a lot of things don’t look at boundary lines.”
Kirkland also onboarded a deputy from Macon County, hoping an external perspective would help eliminate opportunities to shield accountability.
“So just being honest — whether we make mistakes or not — being open about it. None of us are perfect; I get it. We’ve got to be able to be transparent with the public,” said Kirkland.
According to Kirkland, one of his strengths —a skillset vital to the role — is his administrative knowledge, driven by years of experience.
“I’ve worked on budgets, I’ve worked on personnel-type stuff and I’ve built a really good relationship with multiple people over the years. If we run in [sic] situations, I think I’d have a general good idea on who to call when we need help, depending on what resources we need,” he said.
He recently secured Axon body cameras for deputies, who were previously patrolling unrecorded. While body cameras aren’t a perfect tool and footage remains difficult for the public to access, empirically, they “improve accountability and lower reports of misconduct,” according to Britannica. The cameras have been in use for about two weeks, Kirkland said.
Body cameras aren’t the only change Kirkland has brought to the department. He’s put a greater emphasis on training, recommending Crisis Intervention Team programs — which “provide law enforcement officers the knowledge and skills they need to de-escalate persons in crisis” and “emphasizes providing treatment instead of incarceration for persons with mental illness” — to his deputies.
“We’ve already sent several of our officers [to CIT]. One thing that I felt like we were lacking before was the opportunity to send our officers to training. And that’s something I’ve really tried to initiate, trying to get our deputies just as trained in everything that they can possibly get trained on,” like interviews, interrogations, search warrants, even investigations themselves, he said.
Kirkland has also pivoted SCSO toward community-based policing during his brief tenure. For example, the office recently purchased an app that will deliver information quickly to residents similar to what’s used some nearby counties. In communities generating the highest call volume, Kirkland said, a deputy has been chatting with residents to “try to find the roots of the problems.”
“So far, we’ve been through five communities, and our call volume in all these communities has dropped about 95%,” he said.
Overall, the sheriff explained, his vision is to take deputies away from “the four lanes trying to do stuff that the highway patrol should be doing” and into “communities where people that hadn’t been seeing a high presence of law enforcement are getting to see now.”
That strategy might be especially useful to deputies investigating drug trafficking and possession. Swain County has suffered acutely from the epidemic of substance abuse and addiction. Its 2025 NC Public School Forum profile reported a “drug and medicine overdose rate” nearly 300% above the state average per 100,000 residents.
Kirkland said while all recreational drugs are illegal and “we’re going to enforce the law,” the office is “going after drugs that strongly affect people,” like methamphetamine and fentanyl, because they’re killing folks and increasing property crimes.
On the rehabilitation side, he’s already instituted an in-jail, grant-funded initiative headed by Sunrise Recovery to teach classes with the aim of facilitating addiction recovery to reduce recidivism. It recently graduated its first class.
However, talk and support programs are as far as he is willing to go, at least for now, when it comes to providing relief for those both incarcerated and struggling with addiction. Indeed, Kirkland will not be implementing medication assisted treatment, also known as medication for opioid use disorders, in the near future, because he doesn’t find it feasible.
“I don’t think MAT is a possibility for us. I think we’d have to have more full-time medical staff on scene to be able to monitor that … But we have spoken with our medical staff here, and they’re not comfortable with implementing that program,” he said.
2022 Department of Justice guidance clarified that opioid use disorder is considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act and that denying someone in custody pre-prescribed MAT is a violation of the act. While some jails do not have sufficient on-site resources to perform medication assisted treatment, if it’s already prescribed to someone in custody, administrators are legally mandated to find an off-site provider.
That’s because MAT has been the standard of care for opioid use disorder since the 1970s, and it’s backed by decades of empirical research demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing overdose deaths, preventing those in recovery from reoffending and curbing the spread of communicable diseases.
When asked if he’d support MAT if circumstances permitted, he described it as “something that I would want to do a little more research on.”
Opioid use isn’t the only widespread problem in Swain County; so too is the rate of homelessness. The NC Coalition to End Homelessness takes a Point-in-Time Count, “an annual snapshot of who is experiencing homelessness during one night in January,” for every state county plus the Qualla Boundary. In 2024, it counted 13 unhoused folks in Swain County. By 2025, that had doubled to 26.
Kirkland has a similar anecdotal experience.
“Five years ago, you would never see a homeless person in Swain County,” he said.
Behind such an influx, Kirkland explained, is “county organizations that are offering things” to unhoused folks while also acknowledging that there’s nowhere to sleep, leading to encampments.
While a 100% increase in year-to-year homelessness seems drastic, it reflects 13 additional people who have become unhoused. Swain’s low population density and similarly low unhoused population inflates the percentage. Yes, homelessness is rising, but it likely will not continue to double, instead following the more gradual — yet still significant — upward-facing nationwide trend caused primarily by a structural lack of housing affordability and other economic factors such as job loss, according to decades of research and studies conducted by the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and other federal partners.
As for when deputies encounter encampments, Kirkland’s policy has been to get them “cleaned up.” In one instance, he said, “I’m sure there were probably needles and things like that laying around. It’s just very unsafe for people that want to enjoy county property.” After the encampment was destroyed, the people “moved on,” he recalled, explaining that “we gave them plenty of an opportunity to get what stuff they wanted.”
While encampments can introduce safety hazards to county property and residents and officials are often pressured to “clean them up,” researchers documenting sweeps have found that crucial medications and medical supplies are regularly discarded. 2024 BMC Public Health paper surveying 397 homeless individuals found that they were at a greater risk of reporting an infectious disease and poorer mental health after being ordered to vacate an encampment, which ultimately poses an even larger hazard to public health.
Other than cleaning up encampments, SCSO will “try to get a hold of family members for [homeless folks]” to be picked up and brought “back to a place where they do have housing,” he said.
According to Kirkland, there’s not one central cause of homelessness.
“There’s some people I think just want to live that way,” he said. “And I think there’s some people that run into unique situations that force them to be that way.”
The USICH lists the homelessness-as-a-choice narrative as one of the most common cultural myths.
Wayne Dover
Republican challenger Wayne Dover began his law enforcement career in 1994 and now works for the Bryson City Police Department.
“I have served as school resource officer, patrol officer, patrol sergeant investigator, major crimes investigator, special victims unit investigator and now assistant chief of police,” he said, adding that after more than 2,000 hours of specialized training, he’s also certified to teach basic law enforcement academy trainees.
Wayne Dover. File photo
Dover’s candidacy is marked by what he describes as a commitment to “bring change and a fresh perspective to the sheriff’s department.”
“The sheriff’s office has had the same leadership for a number of years,” he said. “And that can lead to stagnation.”
Dover proposed splitting the county into three patrol zones — east, west and central — to reduce response times.
“And our vehicles will no longer be all blacked out. They would all have highly visible marquees,” he said.
That’s a transparency measure — blacked-out vehicles during patrol operations may cause civilians to question the legitimacy of the interaction, heightening risk for both them and the officer. Plus, it might make the public more susceptible to law enforcement imposters. And the move would also be in direct response to the breach in trust between SCSO and the public, especially the Eastern Band; Cochran allegedly solicited his victims while driving unmarked SCSO vehicles.
Dover praised Kirkland’s effort “on starting the foundation of that rebuild in trust,” while outlining his plans as sheriff to build out “strong, lasting partnerships and relationships” with the EBCI.
He admitted the presence of a “unique beast” — deeded acreage within the Qualla Boundary, which is county-owned and surrounded by tribal land. To ensure sufficient law enforcement presence in those areas, Dover said he “hope[s] to sign MOUs with the Eastern Band, so they could secure the scene within their boundaries until one of my officers got there to take over.”
As for preventing another violation of trust, Dover recommended technological safeguards like body cameras, “GPS on all the vehicles, GPS locators on all of their cell phones, so we can track [deputies] at any time.”
The ideal culture within SCSO would also prioritize training for officers, Dover said, stressing that his team wouldn’t have to choose between attendance and patrol.
“If I also need somebody to cover that shift while they’re in training, then I would cover that shift,” he said.
Of all courses offered to law enforcement, Dover spoke most highly of one.
“Verbal Judo is a phenomenal training,” he said.
“It’s a de-escalation technique, behavioral health training. So, [deputies] can recognize what might be taking place” and act accordingly, he explained.
For Dover, de-escalation and working with the community would be the office’s core principles, especially when encountering someone with a mental health or substance abuse disorder, both of which he said are primary causes of homelessness. Though a substantial proportion of unhoused folks do struggle with one or more of these issues, the majority have neither, USICH reported. The agency also noted explicitly that “mental health and substance abuse disorders do not cause homelessness.”
Were he sheriff, interactions between the homeless and deputies would primarily consist of referrals to services offering applicable resources.
“We would make sure that they had the opportunity to speak with a social worker and/or other community partners to get the help that they needed,” he said, adding that this treatment applies to folks both inside and outside the county jail.
And for incarcerated folks seeking help, Dover said he “absolutely” supports medication assisted treatment.
“Just because they’re in jail doesn’t mean they’re bad people. They just make bad choices, and it is our job to make sure that they are protected, physically, mentally and emotionally, and we have to be able to give them tools to do that so they can be productive members of society,” he said.
Dover would also look to better fund the Sunrise program using money from the states’s opioid settlement that is being doled back out to counties.
“[Sunrise staff] are currently in the jail, but as of right now, they are not being paid to do so,” he said. Kirkland clarified that the course is grant-supported.
Another program Dover would like to see was first introduced in neighboring Jackson County by the Sylva Police Department. In 2021, the department began working in partnership with Western Carolina University to respond to applicable emergency calls alongside a social worker. According to NC Health News, the social worker refers affected community members to resources and services “with the goal of addressing the root issues driving the police calls.” The partnership has enjoyed considerable success and by November 2025 had expanded to seven additional agencies.
Dover is also impressed by these results.
“I would partner with Western Carolina University social workers, community care. It’s been very positive feedback from them, from the Sylva Police Department,” he said.
Dover stands behind a similar “community policing” approach to drug enforcement, whereby officers build relationships with residents, who then feel more empowered to call in suspicious activity.
“[SCSO] will also be holding monthly reports to the community, introducing the officers in those communities at their community meetings. So, ‘This will be your community officer. This is his or her name, this is their contact information,’ and so forth,” he told SMN.
Doug ‘Tank’ Anthony
Anthony has been in law enforcement since July 1996, serving throughout the years as a patrol officer and drug investigator, answering calls for service and working with interdiction teams and task forces.
He is running with an eye for change, though this cycle isn’t his first time seeking election. His name was on the 2022 ballot, when he lost to Cochran. It is, however, the first election in which the Democrat had to confront the breach of trust between SCSO and EBCI. Anthony didn’t have a measured plan for improving the sheriff’s office’s reputation among Cherokee residents but attested that it’s important to “work with every county around [the department].”
To encourage transparency and accountability, he said it’s all about picking people “who want to work for you for the right reasons,” which looks like doing the job not for valor or headlines but out of a deep care for county residents. When asked how he’d ensure staff prioritized committed responsibility over performative action, Anthony said he’d “talk to them” and find out.
His plan to engage in intra-departmental conversation carries over to training as well. While Anthony is a major proponent of training, finding many courses useful and effective, he did not recommend a specific one, arguing that it matters more “how the officer takes that training procedure.” Did the deputy gain any knowledge from this hypothetical week-long course, or did they rather “look at [it] as a vacation?”
When asked how to remedy the latter motivation, Anthony said, “Talk to [the officers] when they get back. Let them explain to you what they just learned.” He finds this dialogue more useful than body cameras when it comes to engaging with his officers.
One argument against body cameras is that there’s no such thing as a neutral interpretation. Anthony spoke to this issue of perception when admitting that “the public’s going to see it differently than someone in law enforcement is going to perceive it … it ain’t always cut and dry how stuff happens.”
This is one reason he doesn’t see the point of wearing one.
“You’re trying to actually answer calls, so I would say no to that [question of wearing body cameras],” he said.
Again, while body cameras aren’t perfect, research throughout the years has overwhelmingly shown they do improve transparency and conduct.
While Kirkland is on calls, he isn’t wearing a camera either, Anthony alleged, although the sheriff denied this claim wholeheartedly.
Anthony’s desire to find truth through relational measures was echoed by his tendency to personalize structural issues affecting residents. For example, he emphasized the extent to which the community is affected by substance abuse by implicating the household.
“Every family here in Swain County is affected with the drug [and] alcohol problem, in some way, shape, form or fashion,” he said.
One way to reduce drug activity, he said, would take the form of “tough love.” When prosecuting a drug dealer, “you [should] show you still care [about him] and still punish him, just like a kid — like he’s your child,” Anthony explained.
Likewise, he has sympathy for those perpetually moving from release to recidivism.
“So many people are caught in that [incarceration] cycle when they’re young. They can’t get out of that cycle.” Because of that, Anthony said, “You want to help these people, so they won’t [break the law] again.”
That could look like installing a counselor or a GED program or prescribing a medication to aid recovery from addiction, especially given the status of many who get caught up in the system.
“There’s more people sitting in these county jails that’s not even been convicted or sentenced yet, they’re sitting and waiting on a bond. You can’t assume that nobody in jail is automatically guilty,” he said.
In 2025, out of the 562,000 people sitting in local jails, 457,000 were legally innocent. In other words, 81% of those in jail are solely incarcerated because they couldn’t afford to make bail or had been denied bail altogether.
Anthony again used a domestic setting to outline the crisis of homelessness, though by comparison, he viewed this issue with more distance and less nuance.
“I think that so many people make a choice, and their family tells them, ‘If you want to do that, you can’t stay here; you can’t live here.’ And they want to make that choice, keep doing what they’re doing and choose not to live at that house.”
But he said that’s no excuse not to help those who are seeking it — whether through referrals to treatment facilities or a call to a case worker.
“When they reach out to you, you got to be willing to help them right there. They may reach out to you at midnight. Your department’s got to be able to help them at midnight, not from 8 to 5,” Anthony said.
David Southards
Democrat David Southards retired in October 2025 with 28 years of experience under his belt. His first job was with the Swain County Sheriff’s Office, where he worked for 18 years in various capacities, including the jail, dispatch and patrol where he rose to the rank of lieutenant.
After leaving SCSO, Southards worked with Western Carolina University Police as an investigator though his last three-and-a-half years of service was with the Andrews Police Department in Cherokee County.
David Southards. File photo
“We picked up [the APD] that had been shut down for some time and rebuilt the department back,” he said.
Throughout his career, Southards has completed detention officer training and obtained basic, intermediate and advanced certifications in law enforcement. He’s also worked in civil process court.
The rationale behind his campaign, like Dover’s and Anthony’s, involves bringing change to the office, though Southards is more specific about how it might look.
“I feel strongly about different things; community-focused policing, things like transparency, which — it has plagued this department locally — civilian oversight,” he said, explaining that as sheriff, he’d start a community resource committee involving monthly meetings he facilitates with representatives from each neighborhood.
Southards, like Dover, wants to split the county into patrol zones.
He didn’t specify what those would look like but explained that an officer would stay in their zone, barring some sort of emergency call. He told SMN that he’d also restructure the office, so more deputies are on patrol with an emphasis on stationary patrol. “They’d be more visible for the folks to see,” he said.
Additionally, Southards would like domestic violence prevention and enforcement to be more heavily prioritized, just as it was when he worked there 20-or-so years prior.
“I want to bring back two full time domestic violence officers,” he said.
These officers would attend relevant training and teach classes on self-defense.
Swain County already has a “drug dog,” he said, but when dealing with potentially lethal substances like fentanyl, he’s all for getting another one. Finally, he would organize a narcotics team, especially after witnessing one work effectively in Cherokee County with as few as three officers.
While he’d like to implement those plans in the future, Southards understands his duty to mend what has happened in the past. Were he sheriff, repair and restoration of trust between SCSO and the Qualla Boundary would be “something that we’re going to have to work at constantly,” he said. He sat down with tribal leaders Feb. 4 to discuss responsibilities of the sheriff’s office.
“[Qualla and non-Qualla Boundary residents are] neighbors; we’re in the same county … And just like you would do for your neighbor, we’ve got to watch out for our neighbor, their property,” he said.
Consequently, Southards strongly supports the mutual aid contract between SCSO and the CIPD.
As for promoting accountability, Southards, like Kirkland and Dover, pushed for body cameras. He started wearing a camera in 2017. In fact, acquiring that equipment was his first move after helping revive the Andrews Police Department.
He also recommended implementing additional supervision of deputies, plus extra training and initial personnel background checks beyond what’s required of the department. That extra training could look like CIT training; “it’s the best training,” he said, concurring with Kirkland.
The week-long training, with annual refreshers, is centered around de-escalation when encountering a mental health-related crisis. Regarding mental health generally, Southards argued that jail care should be more accessible, advocating for the inter-jail transport crew to bring incarcerated folks to treatment appointments.
Mental health care isn’t only the jail service that Southards wants to bolster. While the Sunrise program is wonderful for those struggling with addiction, he told SMN that he’s “really not sure why it took so long” to install it.
To that tune, he’s a proponent of MAT, although he was unsure if it could be administered entirely through the jail. If staffing were an issue, he’d facilitate treatment at a nearby facility.
Education is yet another piece of the jail services puzzle.
“I’m for also partnering with Southwestern Community College to set up a program where inmates can get their GED while in jail. Because for the 18 years I worked there, and other places I’ve worked, I saw parents get arrested, and then years later, the kids get arrested. We’ve got to break that cycle,” said Southards.
As sheriff, part of breaking that cycle would consist of exploring alternatives to incarceration, like the 90-96 court program, for possession of lower-class drugs such as cannabis.
According to the North Carolina Bar Association, the 90-96 program “is a conditional discharge for those who have been charged with certain alcohol and drug offenses, and this is their first charge (with the exception of minor traffic offenses).” The district attorney will dismiss the charge following graduation from the program and payment of all necessary fees and costs. They can then qualify for expunction.
Criminalization, in all instances of drug abuse, both perpetuates racial disparity and fails to address the underlying addiction. A 2018 Pew Research Center study using data from 96,000 individuals found “no relationship between prison terms and drug misuse.”
Housing someone in jail is also costly, potentially diverting funds from treatment and rehabilitation programs. Plus, a criminal record can prevent someone with the motivation to recover from finding secure housing and employment, contributing to recidivism and homelessness.
For Southards, the other aspect of breaking the cycle looks like rejecting criminalization of the unhoused.
“People ask me, ‘What are you going to do about the homeless?’” he said. “And what I tell them is, ‘Hey, it’s not a crime to be homeless. And if they break the law, I will enforce the law just like I would on folks who are not unhoused.’ But the biggest issue that we face here with people that are homeless is the mental health.”
Southards would like to see a homeless shelter in Swain or a nearby county. He spoke highly of a two-week 2023 event in Andrews called Mission of Hope and coordinated by The Worship Tent,“ a self-described “place where many come to find Salvation, Restoration, Healing, Joy and chains broken off as they are washed in the Blood of Jesus!” aimed to ‘save’ those struggling with addiction and homelessness through free nightly worships and dinner, plus talks from and invitations to various year-long, free and residential Christian rehab centers.
He plans to bring Mission of Hope to Swain County if elected.
